Escape Lizards

This game is pretty hard sometimes, but at the same time has that "ok, one more try" feel to it, making it quite addictive. The levels show great variation and most of the time allow for many ways to complete them. Apart from a few performance hiccups it's a solid game with some fun gameplay!

Escape Lizards: ~~~~~~~~~~~ If you had a choice to be an oviparous animal, which one would you be . . . a dinosaur? Well, as far as I know they are pretty much extinct. What about a bird? They are fast in the air but not great on ground. I know, you could be a lizard! Look like a tiny dinosaur and you would be as fast as a bird (on the ground). Well, before you become a fully grown lizard, you have to navigate your egg through treacherous levels. How hard is it to be a lizard egg? You will find out in Escape Lizard! Escape Lizards is an action platformer/puzzle game where you take control of a lizard egg through over 100 levels within 11 worlds. I am sure that you have played a maze ball game sometime in your life. If you have never played this type of game before, let me give you a quick description of how it works - they come in all sorts of shapes but the mechanisms are simple. Let’s say you have a rectangular board and you have to move your ball by tilting the board in different directions to get your ball to the finish line. Well, imagine this type of mechanism on a videogame, and your goal is to reach the bell at the end as fast as possible to score a golden star without falling off the levels, collecting as many lizard coins as possible, pushing vulture eggs (to unlock new skins) and avoiding obstacles. You will move your egg by tilting forward, backward, left and right using either the stick on your gamepad or the arrows on your keyboard. You can also flip the level clockwise or anti-clockwise in some stages, which can be seriously tricky and challenging. And to make the equation even simpler, you will have to use the jump button too! Each world has 10 levels to complete but you must have a specific number of gold, silver and bronze stars as well as lizard coins to unlock the next world. I really like the variety and how well the levels are designed, and let me tell you, it is going to take you several attempts to successfully reach the bell. One big and important point - make sure you hit the bell and NOT do my favourite trick, which is successfully navigate through but miss the bell. I know, pretty silly! The good news is that you can restart the level straight away by clicking on one of your gamepad buttons or use the key “r” on the keyboard. As you progress through the worlds, the difficulty will increase rather quickly; you can expect to be frustrated at some point. Graphically, the game looks fabulous and the controls are extremely responsive. I prefer using the gamepad rather than the keyboard. The soundtrack is fun and suits the game very well. Positives: ~~~~~~~ - Great graphics - 100 + well-designed levels - Challenging gameplay - Unlock skin eggs - Achievements Negatives: ~~~~~~~~ - Can become frustrating restarting a level over and over - No trading cards An extremely well-designed game with a challenging gameplay! 8/10 Key provided by developer/publisher for review purposes. Any opinions expressed are entirely my own! [url=https://www.zeepond.com/reviews][b]EPIC “THE CPT FROGGY” REVIEWS UP NOW ON ZEEPOND, THE HOME OF THE ALMIGHTY FROG![/b][/url] [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thecptfroggyclub#curation][b]FOLLOW THE CPT FROGGY CURATOR PAGE HERE[/b][/url]

Nice game and recommend it to players, who like challanges because the game gets hard pretty fast.

The important thing with a game like this is whether or not the levels are any good, and this game has consistently fantastic level design - they're challenging, varied and interesting in general across the board. The "original platformer mechanics" aren't just gimmicks either - they've clearly been well thought-out and executed, and the levels make excellent use of them. It can be quite difficult as a result, but it always feels like a challenge rather than a negative point. Having the ability to quickly restart a level at any time helps with that, especially when you're doing runs to collect all the eggs. As some other reviewers have stated, there were some performance issues but the developer seems to have ironed a lot of those out. All in all, pretty great! Definitely recommended.

Escape Lizards has some flaws, but it's a good game overall and perhaps the closest you're going to get to Super Monkey Ball on Steam. A few other reviews were justifiably hacked off with some camera issues, but the dev has recently fixed this and added tons of miscellaneous graphical and camera options to boot, as well as altering gameplay mechanics and rebalancing the entire game. Thumbs up there. This is the only marble game I've found where you tilt the game world rather than your ball, hence the emulation of Super Monkey Ball. Obviously it isn't quite up to that lofty standard, but a lot of effort has gone into Escape Lizards and the core gameplay certainly works. You move through the levels by tilting the floor, and also have the option of flipping the environment at 90 degree angles at any point, which makes for some interesting and tricky paths through levels. If you're a speedrunner or love messing around with absurd shortcuts through levels, you'll probably love this mechanic. The movement feels pretty slick and unusually for the genre, you have a lot of control over your aerial movement in addition to being able to jump. Combining all of the above would assuredly make for some crazy tricks from better players than myself. The amount of content is very solid, with 110 levels across 11 environments. In each level there are three main goals: time medal, collecting all coins and knocking all vulture eggs off the stage. I mostly went for time on my first pass through, then went back for a bit of casual monetary exploration and vulture genocide. The levels themselves are very varied, and this is possibly the biggest strength of the game. Some are straight speed gauntlets, others being large mazes and more still involving numerous obstacles in your path - no two levels are the same, and there are new varieties of obstacle introduced regularly. Collecting (almost) everything took me 16 hours, with the later levels taking quite a few tries to net all of the coins in particular, which is a good amount of content for the price. The downsides are that this is a budget indie title, so while the graphics and environments are functional, they're not going to set the gaming world ablaze. Level difficulty can also be uneven - the whole game rebalanced has been a sizeable net positive overall, but occasionally you'll bump into a time limit that seems stricter than it should be, or some bizarrely positioned coins. The developer could well patch some of these in the future, though. It's also worth noting that while I don't suffer from motion sickness at all, those that do should turn down the camera sensitivity significantly - it flicks around a lot, and could be quite jarring. Escape Lizards had a strange start to life on Steam, initially being priced at double the current price, then reduced down to £3 (too cheap, really) before finding the current happy medium. Perhaps that, combined with the niche genre, is why it's relatively undiscovered. Still, I had fun with the game and would recommend it to marble game enthusiasts and those who enjoy a bit of a challenge in 3D platformers. Also, the hilarious voiceover in the menus is almost worth the price of admission alone.

Really fun style, with some interesting gameplay and great physics. There are some minor UI issues, and performance issues on some levels (although this might just be my setup). If you're looking for a challenging, addictive platformer, I can recommend this!

Was making this game $2 out of the blue intentional? I don't know. It doesn't matter though. I could have sworn it was around $15 when I first saw it mentioned in a rockpapershotgun article about 'new games on steam you probably didn't notice,' and its 'supermonkeyball-like' gameplay was what made me keep it in my wishlist. Welp bringing it down to $2 did just that and I can safely say that this game is SUPER quality, even if the main menu, choices of fonts, and other various things would have you think otherwise. First things first, the options menu is better than most games nowadays, even some AAA ones, including essential things for a PRECISION PLATFORMER such as this. Joystick deadzones, camera adjustments, frame rate caps(or lack thereof), are all present. Hats off. Second, and more importantly. The gameplay here is really dope for fans of Super Monkey Ball. You navigate your perfectly-spherical egg to a bell instead of a gate at the end of the level. The bell, like the gate, can be missed completely, thus necessitates being hit every time to complete the level/update your score/hit more per-level objectives. Those objectives are, -coins -vulture eggs that need to be rolled off the level -the time limit (gold, silver, & bronze medals) What's unique!? [spoiler]-you have a limited number of jumps/hops per level, allowing 'some' SWEET shortcuts. Again, hats off. -you can rotate the gravity of the level 90 degrees with each press of some buttons. [/spoiler] That's it really, this game is pretty great especially for the low price as of now. If it could use one thing from Super Monkey Ball that could be that local pass'n'play multiplayer.

I got this game for free, not as a review copy explicitly, but instead in a giveaway. Anyway... I think this is a fun game, but there's definately some issues with it. By far the biggest is unfortunately the camera. If you are rolling in a straight line, tilt backwards to stop and start rolling backwards, the camera does a 180 to get "behind" you. Because the tilt controls are relative to the camera, a slight misstep becomes a complete loss of control. You can control the camera yourself, so this would be fine if there were a way to just disable the camera's automatic movement, but there is not. Speaking of controlling the camera, you can invert the Y axis, but not the x-axis, which is very annoying as again, tilting is tied to camera positioning, and I'm constantly rotating in the wrong direction. For a game relying so much on the camera perspective, there needs to be better camera control. Maybe if there was a toggle to lock the camera, or at least if the auto-camera was disabled while you are giving your own rotation instructions to the camera, it would feel less like i'm fighting the game, and more like i'm having fun. I've managed to kill myself with the 90-degree flip power when it didn't go where I wanted because of the camera too now. My current reccomendation for this game is NO, but after playing more I might change it. Initially, I don't think it's that great.

It's a fun puzzle game, but I would prefer a bit more camera smoothing.

Really enjoyed this game! It reminded me a lot of "Super Monkey Ball" Check out my full Indie Impression: https://youtu.be/g3IyJw4jwpA